


Even Bad Days End

by SophiaCatherine



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Chronic Pain, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, with a lighter but realistic ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 06:44:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15701952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/pseuds/SophiaCatherine
Summary: Mick tries to figure out what's wrong with his partner.





	Even Bad Days End

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thette/gifts).



> A belated birthday gift for [Thette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thette/pseuds/Thette), who partly prompted this.

Mick should have known from the moment up he woke up. The first clue he missed was finding himself freezing in an empty bed.

So the bastard had turned the thermostat down again. He pulled on his robe—the fluffy one—and trudged down the stairs, narrowly avoiding the sharp edges on the uncarpeted flooring. He attempted a poor impression of his partner as he dragged himself over a splintered step. "' _Mick_ , you worry too much. We’ll only be here a month. Not gonna die from a couple of broken stairs in the meantime.’ Jackass.”

In the kitchen—mostly empty, save for a coffee maker and a few cups and plates—he reset the thermostat. “Who the hell thinks 55 degrees is living conditions?” Slamming the button on the coffee machine, he muttered, “8 a.m. and the bastard’s already got me talking to myself.” He flumped into a chair, setting up to wait for Len to get out of the shower.

Thirty minutes later, he could still hear the water running in the tiny bathroom, just above him. “Right,” he muttered, and thundered back up the stairs. “Turning down the thermostat and then standing under hot fucking water for half an hour. Great way to make your last measly score last even longer. And when you’re not even planning the next—HEY ASSHOLE! Leave me some hot water!” He banged on the door in time with the last few words.

Silence from inside the bathroom, other than the persistent spatter of water.

Mick growled, shook his head, and schlepped downstairs again.

He was lolling on the single chair in the kitchen, holding his third coffee and tapping his foot, when the human barn cat emerged. Mick looked up, primed to insult him, and paused. Len was weirdly quiet, pouring out a coffee and going to the window. After a minute he came back, slowly lowering himself down to kneel at the little dorm room cooler that passed for a fridge in their kitchen. Mick had been meaning to put that on the counter, but hadn’t got round to it yet.

“All good?” Mick tried, after a minute more of silence.

Len didn’t quite snap, but there was an edge to his voice. “Where’s the milk?”

Mick felt his eyebrows lift. “He speaks. We ran out. I’ll get more later.”

The fridge was slammed shut. Len stood up slowly, pulling himself up with a white-knuckle grip on the counter. Turning, he gave Mick a look—a ghost of his usual death glare, missing most of the ice.

“I’m sorry?” Mick added, mostly to break the silence.

“Fine. Whatever.” An unfinished coffee banged down on the counter.

“What you doing now?”

“Another shower,” he murmured from the door.

Sighing, Mick cursed the day he agreed to lay low in a real house but let Lenny choose one without a second bathroom, and left for the gym.

* * *

It was afternoon by the time he came back. He stopped dead, hanging onto the front door as it opened onto the living room. Len, who had apparently got right back into his PJs after showering, was sprawled out on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. In front of _football_.

“Hi,” Mick said.

Len didn’t answer, at first. After a while he glanced over, nodded at Mick, and turned back to the TV.

“You want anything?”

Len shook his head at the TV.

Okay. New strategy. “Can I join you?”

A shrug, so he perched on the arm of the sofa. “Mmm, Patriots can’t win now. Hillson ain’t even playing defense.” He grinned through Len’s silence. “I said at the start of the season he wasn’t a good—”

Getting up abruptly, throwing off his blankets onto a pile on the floor, Len started towards the bedroom. Mick stood up with him, in unconscious sympathetic synchronism. Already at the door, Len never saw it.

Shit.

Mick sat back down hard. Pulling out his phone, he flipped through his contacts.

_Your asshat brother turned thermostat way down. Spent half the AM under hot shower. Moped in front of *football* for couple of hrs. Ran away. What did I do to piss him off?_

The reply came back almost immediately.

_mick. how many years have you known him_

This seemed like a non-sequitur, but he texted back: _27? Your point?_

Lisa sent back an emoji that, after much puzzling out, Mick decided was probably a guy hitting himself in the face. Then a proper text.

_he’s having a bad day, asshole. i seem to recall you’ve been there._

Mick was still staring at the message when his phone beeped a second time.

_he told you about the shit he’s had going on recently right?_

In answer, Mick texted three question marks.

There was a brief, uncomfortable wait for her next message.

_you never talked to me, we never met, you don’t know I exist. he used to get like this a lot. still does just doesn’t talk about it._

_p.s. keep making him food till he eats it_

Mick, who now remembered he was a thoughtless dumbass, put his head in his hands.

* * *

He didn’t go near the bedroom for a couple of hours. His partner liked his space—especially when he thought he looked weak. By the evening, though, Mick couldn’t take it anymore.

He stood at the door, biting a nail, a bowl in his other hand. Len was in bed with the covers pulled over his head.

Eventually he decided to risk it, approaching the bed slowly. He got no response when he said Len’s name, so he sat down on a corner of the mattress. “Shove over.”

Under the covers, Len mumbled something probably insulting.

“Fuck off. I brought stew.” He put it down on the nightstand.

Len pulled the bedcovers down to his neck, eyeing Mick suspiciously. “Great. Thinks I’m on my deathbed.” He was clearly aiming for his signature drawl, but the words came out thin and ragged.

Mick snorted. “Food don’t mean that. Did people bring you a lot of hot food when you were sick?”

“No...” The angry light in Len’s eyes was extinguished all at once, his gaze suddenly distant.

Mick took in his gray pallor and the tight set of his jaw. He was burrowed under the blankets in a curled-up ball. Seeking refuge. “Shove over,” Mick said again, more insistently. Len’s quiet acquiescence, dutifully shifting to make space, wasn’t a great sign either. Mick slid under the comforter all the same. “You want the food?”

Len shook his head slowly. “Sorry,” he murmured.

“‘s okay. Can heat it up later.”

They lapsed into silence, Mick curling close enough into Len to feel him very slowly relaxing as he stared up at the ceiling.

“You don’t have to play this guessing game with me,” Mick said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

Len shook his head in slow confusion, eyes still fixed on something Mick couldn’t see.

“If you’re depressed, or shit. You can talk to me.”

He snorted back something like a laugh, turning an uneasy glance on Mick, then looking away again just as fast. “Sure. ‘Cause we’re good at the talking.”

Undeterred, Mick shrugged. “So let’s pretend we are.”

More silence, this time stretching on and on, and at last Mick made to give up, moving to get out of bed. Under the covers, a hand grabbed his. “Don’t go,” Len whispered.

Mick rolled back, following the pull on his hand and squeezing. “Not going nowhere, Lenny.”

Len’s head disappeared under the covers again. _“Fuck,”_ he bit out, on a half-sob.

Mick didn’t let go of his hand, though he looked away, wincing at a stab of his own irrelevance. He waited quietly for a while, attempting discretion. When he felt his partner’s breathing ease up, he said, “Things been this bad for long?”

He felt Len tense again, the prospect of talking still clearly daunting. Then, sighing: “Maybe. I don’t know… Maybe.”

Mick kept his voice low and even. Spooking Len was alarmingly easy at times like this. “Why’s today so shit?”

Len sucked in a breath, sitting up stiffy. “No spoons. Everything hurts,” he said, still staring at the ceiling. “And…” He shook his head heavily. “I don’t know.”

Mick turned to look at him, a bit taken aback. He knew things had escalated with Len’s chronic pain over the years—but his partner’s whole act seemed to rely on not showing it. Whether Len was too proud to talk about it, or whether his survival had always depended on not being seen as weak, Mick didn’t know. Both, maybe. He watched the shallow rise and fall of Len’s chest, the lines etched on his tired face. He’d said something to Mick once, years ago, in a rare, vulnerable moment. _Don’t ever expect me to tell you the whole story._

He clapped his hand lightly on the mattress between them. “What do you want to eat, right now? I’ll find it.”

“Hot apple pie. Ice cream,” came the quiet reply, a few moments later.

He was back with it in ten minutes. Side by side, Mick dug quietly into three scoops of cookie dough, and Len just picked at his mint choc chip.

Len’s spoon clattered down against the bowl, suddenly. There was a flicker of despair lurking behind his eyes—cloaked deep, but Mick could see it. He touched Mick’s arm. “What do you do?”

He didn’t have to ask _about what_. “Burn shit.” But they both knew nothing like that would ever help his partner. Where Mick could set loose the monster inside him and then chain it up again, a part of Len would always be trapped under the ice.

Mick looked up to catch Len staring, wide-eyed, at his melting ice cream. Mick could just make out the tremor in his voice when he spoke again, heard old fault lines fracturing inside him. “Sometimes I feel like I’m dead inside.”

He shook his head firmly, sliding his hand back under the covers to grab Len’s again, and his partner didn’t fight him. “You ain’t dead, Lenny. Things just got on top of ya.”

Len tipped his head back against the headboard, staring back up at the ceiling. Mick followed the line of his gaze, watching him fight to find words—as much as Mick ever did. Mick struggled against a mind that went left when he tried to go right. It was frustrating, sometimes enraging. Len’s problem was different. One wrong word could be a betrayal in his ranks, a fist in his face, a bullet in his back.

An echo of a younger Len: _He’s tried to kill me before, just for saying the wrong thing._

“The MacLeary job,” Len whispered, breaking into Mick’s reverie.

Mick nodded. The Coast City branch of MacLeary Bank. The target they’d worked on for six months, a snitch on their crew bringing their plans to a devastating end. “There’s always gonna be shit that goes wrong in this business.”

He heard Len take a shaky breath, in and out. “Did I screw up?”

“Nah.” He reached around to rub between Len’s shoulders. “You got everything right.”

“So why’d two of my crew get shot?” he croaked.

Shaking his head, Mick tried for comforting, unfamiliar to him though it was. “Dangerous business, this. Not your fault.”

Len shook his head insistently. “I can’t—” He winced and tried again, dropping his head back against the headboard again. “Can’t fail like that, Mick.”

A wave of utter uselessness swept through Mick, words failing him again, and he bit back a curse. Not what Len needed right now.

Len’s focus was elsewhere, though, shoulders sagging in a long sigh. “What’s it matter, anyway? Not like I live the kind of life where I can find a shrink.”

It seemed like a strange thought to follow with. But Len had always been better at the self-analysis than Mick. He ran his other hand across Len’s head, feeling him shiver a little under his touch. “I dunno. Elena’s pretty good.”

“Yes, but you tell her you work in private security.”

“I could work in private security.”

Len chuckled, shooting him a grin—the first smile Mick had seen from him that day. Well, it was something.

* * *

Much later, just as he was on the edge of sleep, Mick remembered. “Hey, asshole. What’s with the thermostat?”

On the other side of the bed, Len yawned. “You’re a furnace at night. Gets annoying.”

Mick turned his head to look at him. In the low half-light streaming in from the hallway, Len’s face was masked by a shadow of his old smirk. Mick wanted to reach out, or say something, or _do_ anything to make him feel less of a pointless waste of a partner.

 _We can’t fix each other_ , Len had told Mick once. _Shouldn’t try_.

Jerk was probably right.

“You’re a self-important bastard,” he said, instead.

“So you’ve told me,” Len replied, rolling over to pillow his head on his hand and smile at Mick. “Repeatedly.”

Huffing, Mick grabbed Len and pulled him against his side. “Hey,” Len murmured. “What’d I just say about furnace?” But Mick felt his partner sigh against him, relaxing into sleep.

Good enough for now.

**Author's Note:**

> Note: When Len mentions 'spoons', he's speaking metaphorically. [The Spoon Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory).
> 
> Title comes from a line of poetry by Ms. Moem: "At midnight, even bad days come to an end."
> 
> Thanks so much to [jessicamiriamdrew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessicamiriamdrew/pseuds/jessicamiriamdrew) for really helpful beta reading, as always.
> 
> Come find me on [my tumblr](https://sophiainspace.tumblr.com/).


End file.
